Product Specifications

Product Line(s)

SWITCH FABRIC MODULES (SFM AND SFM2)Designed to support distributed forwarding, the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series SFM (WS-X6500-SFM) and SFM2 (WS-X6500-SFM2) provide dedicated bandwidth to each slot up to 256 Gbps per system. For distributed forwarding to work, an interface module must have a Distributed Forwarding Card (DFC) and must be installed in the chassis with either a Supervisor Engine 2-MSFC2 and an SFM or SFM2, or a Supervisor Engine 720. The SFM works with Cisco Catalyst 6506, 6509, 6509-NEB, and 6509-NEB-A chassis and can occupy any slot. The SFM2 works with 6506, 6509, 6509-NEB, 6509-NEB-A, 6513, 7603, 7606, 7609, OSR-7609, and 7613 chassis; and it can occupy any slot, except in the 6513 and 7613 where it must occupy slot 7 or 8.The Cisco Catalyst 6503 does not currently support the SFM modules as this would leave one slot open after configuring the supervisor and SFM in two of the three available slots. However, the Supervisor 720 provides full CEF256, dCEF256, aCEF720, and dCEF720 capabilities to the Cisco Catalyst 6503 chassis with its slot-efficient integration of the supervisor engine and switch fabric in a single module.

Switch Fabric Module ArchitectureProviding access to the switch fabric through dual 8-Gbps serial channels, the SFM or SFM2 performs all switching on the module ndependent of the passive backplane. For more information see How Distributed Cisco Express Forwarding (dCEF) Works.

High AvailabilityTwo SFM and SFM2 modules can be configured in a system for high availability with 1-to-1 redundancy, where one SFM or SFM2 is operational and one serves as a backup